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LINGUISTIC INSIGHTS INTO the READING PROCESS Ronald Wardhaugh University of Michigan

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LINGUISTIC INSIGHTS INTO the READING PROCESS Ronald Wardhaugh University of Michigan LINGUISTIC INSIGHTS INTO THE READING PROCESS Ronald Wardhaugh University of Michigan Various linguists have put forward proposals for studying the reading process and for teaching reading. Bloomfield and Fries tried to use linguistic knowledge to devise a method of teaching reading based on a belief that children had to learn sound-symbol relationships in order to read. Venezky has pro- posed a model of the reading process which is something of a bridge between their work and that of Chomsky and Halle. The latter have proposed that present English orthography is an op- timal system for the language and that the phonemes of so much interest to Bloomfield and Fries are no more than methodologi- cal artifacts. However, they aclmowledge that their phonological model might not be an appropriate one for children. If this is the case, then certain insights from Bloomfield and Fries may still be relevant. The possible applications of linguistics to reading are still uncertain in the absence of empirical evidence to support any of the present hypotheses. Within applied linguistics the topic of linguistics and reading is of great interest for several reasons which should be stated at the outset.' First of all, it forces us to discuss some of the difficulties involved in attempts to use insights from research in theoretical linguistics in the solution of a practical problem, in this case the problem being one of teaching children to read and of understanding the reading process. In other cases the prob- lem may be one of teaching a foreign language, of translating a text, or of choosing a national language. The same difficulties arise in each case: just what linguistic knowledge is relevant to solving the problem and how may knowledge which is considered relevant be used? The teaching of reading is a very real prob- lem almost everywhere in the world and often a controversial one. Those linguists who have looked at it have adopted a vari- ety of different approaches because they have viewed the nature of the problem differently and because they have also held differ- ent views about the proper nature of linguistic inquiry. In this paper, therefore, I will try to indicate some of the different views 1This is a revised version of a paper presented at the Autumn Meeting of The British Association for Applied Linguistics, in Edinburgh on September 28, 1968. 235 236 LANGUAGE LEARNING, VOL. XVIII, NOS. 3 & 4 of the reading process heldby different linguists and some of the solutions that they have proposed. The second reason which makes this topic interesting is that it allows us to observe some of the limitations of linguistic knowl- edge in solving a practical problem. In the course of the paper, some indication will be given of specific areas in which the limits of linguistic knowledge are reached and in which other kinds of knowledge are called for. It is apparent that certain linguists have confused non-linguistic matters with linguistic ones, possibly to the extent of over-reaching themselves. Such over-reaching is not unique to linguists: experts from many disciplines are accus- tomed to speaking on topics outside their field of competence with the same air of authority they assume within that field! The third reason is no less important than the first two: it is to show how linguistics itself is changing in its concerns, its techniques, and its rhetoric. This last statement should become clearer when the approaches to the reading process taken by Bloomfield and Fries are compared with those taken by Chomsky and Halle. There is a vast difference in both the content and the style of their discussions of the problem; however, there is some reason to say that the conclusions of Bloomfield and Fries on the one hand and those of Chomsky and Halle on the other may not actually be so very far apart. The earliest proposals to use modern linguistic knowledge in the teaching of reading apparently came from Leonard Bloomfield, who was disturbed by certain aspects of school instruction, par- ticularly the instruction given in language and in reading. For example, in a statement published in the very first volume of Language in 1925 explaining in part why the Linguistic Society of America had been founded, he wrote as follows: Our schools are conducted by persons who, from professors of education down to teachers in the classroom, know nothing of the results of linguistic science, not even the relation of writ- ing to speech or of standard language to dialect. In short, they do not know what language is, and yet must teach it, and in con- sequence waste years of every child’s life and reach a poor re- sult.2 Bloomfield felt that the methods being used to teach his son to read were unenlightened and revealed a lack of knowledge about language. Consequently, he devised his own method of teaching his son to read and shared his opinions, methods, and materials 2Leonnrd Bloomfield, “Why a Linguistic Society?” Language. I (1925), p. 5. LINGUISTIC INSIGHTS INTO THE READING PROCESS 237 with those of his friends who had like interests. These later be- came known as the Bloomfield system for teaching reading when they found their way into Let’s Read. Bloomfield rejected the “code-breaking” approach known as phonics as a way of teaching reading, claiming that the proponents of phonics confused statements about speech with those about writing to the point that they often appeared to be teaching chil- dren to speak, whereas all they were really doing was teaching them to associate written symbols with already known words. He objected to practices such as breaking up words into smaller parts corresponding to letters, crediting individual letters with having sounds; sounding out words (e.g., cat as [ka ze ta]), and blending sounds in an attempt to decode written words. Not only did Bloomfield reject a “code-breaking” or phonics approach, but he also rejected the competing “whole-word” approach, claiming that it ignored the alphabetic nature of the English writing sys- tem in that it treated English as though it were Chinese. Bloomfield believed that children learning to read should first be trained in visual discrimination and then be taught to associ- ate visually discriminated objects (letter and word shapes) to al- ready known sounds and meanings. The story line (the meaning of the reading materials) was, he believed, far less important than the regularity of the connection between sounds and symbols, the phoneme-grapheme correspondences. In order therefore to guarantee that children should easily acquire a mastery of these correspondences, Bloomfield insisted that they be trained to dis- criminate in a left-to-right direction and also to name the letters of the alphabet without error. He believed that requiring chil- dren to name the letters in new words from left to right guaran- teed both visual discrimination and correct word attack. Just as linguists, and presumably children (intuitively in their case), could segment an utterance into phonemes, beginning readers had to learn to segment words into graphemes, and the teacher system- atically had to teach children to relate the two discrimination abilities. The Bloomfield approach is, therefore, one which is based on the introduction of regular sound-symbol, or phoneme- grapheme, correspondences so that children can acquire the fun- damental understanding they must acquire in order to read, the understanding that writing is a representation of speech, and, on the whole, quite a systematic one. Bloomfield was also concerned with the notion of contrast, seeing a need to teach whole written words such as can, van, and 3Leonard Bloomfield and Clarence L. Barnhart, Let’s Read (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1961). 238 LANGUAGE LEARNING, VOL. XVIII, NOS. 3 & 4 fan in contrast with each other and to introduce all the contras- tive details of the English writing system gradually and systemati- cally, so that the child learning to read would realize, as Bloom- field wrote, that “printed letter = speech sound to be ~poken.”~ It is not surprising therefore that the. resulting lists, exercises, and testing materials look something like the old “word family” lists in many of the old-fashioned nineteenth century readers. Here is an example of some testing materials from Let’s Read: ban, can, Dan, fan, gan, ... bat, cat, fat, gat, hat, .*. bad, cad, dad, fad, gad, ... bap, cap, dap, gap, Hap, ... 5 bag, cag, dag, fag, gag, ... According to Bloomfield, the basic task the child learning to read had to master was that of understanding the spelling system of English not that of understanding the meanings of English words and sentences. Therefore, it was quite possible for teachers to use nonsense syllables and nonsense words in order to allow their students to achieve such mastery. He wrote as follows on this point: Tell the child that the nonsense syllabIes are parts of real words which he will find in the books that he reads. For example, the child will know han in handle and jan in January and mag in magnet or magpie. The acquisition of nonsense syllables is an important part of the task of mastering the reading process.6 Later, Robert Hall, gave very much the same kind of advice, claiming that the “ultimate test of any method of teaching read- ing is whether the learners can deal with nonsense syllables. .’’7 Both Bloomfield and Hall are really advocating an emphasis on a “code-breaking” approach, but not the particular “code -breaking” approach known as phonics. In his work, Bloomfield was con- c erne d almost exclusive1 y with monosyllabic words and pol ysylla- bic words received very little attention.
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